Global Conflict Governance in the Middle East

Abstract

Transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) occupy a central role in contemporary politics as professional knowledge providers, political agenda setters, and strategic transmission belts for local interest groups across many governance arenas (see Ohanyan 2009; Willetts 2011). While institutionalist, constructivist, and liberal approaches in International Relations (IR) focus on the agency of NGOs in contemporary world politics (Kelly 2011), sociological approaches and globalization theories ask questions about the broader (world) societal horizons against which such agency unfolds (see in particular Drori, Meyer, and Hwang 2006). It is in this latter tradition that this chapter analyzes the role of NGOs for the generation of knowledge about conflicts and possible paths of conflict management in the Middle East. As an empirical illustration, it studies reports by the International Crisis Group (ICG) on Lebanon. It shows that the conflict scripts and narratives advanced by the ICG on how to “correctly” understand conflict and conflict management in Lebanon can best be understood when analyzing the ICG (and other NGOs) as carriers of broader world cultural ideas—referred to in sociological neoinstitutionalism as “rationalized Others” (Meyer 2000)—diffused within the arena of global conflict governance, in particular ideas about legitimate actorhood and proper development. This chapter does not deal at length with the substantive proposals issued by the ICG on conflict management in Lebanon and beyond. Rather, the main research interests here relate to the general characteristics of ICG reports on Lebanon and how these features support the professionalism and impartiality often attributed to carriers of world cultural ideas.KeywordsMiddle EastConflict ManagementWorld SocietyEmpirical IllustrationConflict ActorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.